Not such a bad guy …

… at least not all the time: Remembering Gore Vidal’s Early Work, Love of Movies, and Kind Words for a Young Novelist | Town Topics. (Hat tip, Virginia Kerr.)

While he admits to being “a compulsive reader from the age of six,” he goes on to say that he was “so besotted with movies” that one Saturday he saw five “in a day.” Several pages farther on in Point to Point Navigation, the patrician intellectual of the obituaries confesses, “what I really wanted to be was a movie star: specifically, I wanted to be Mickey Rooney, and to play Puck, as he had done in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”